Forza Frustration

Problems lurking under the bonnet?

Along with so many other 360 owners, I bit the bullet the other week and forked out for Forza 3, knowing it would be a cracking game that would keep me entertained for weeks to come.

How wrong was I?

First impressions were great. I loved the handling, the AI, the number of tracks, and so on.

I was a little niggled over online play. It supports you being able to jump in with anyone, but it’s only a three lap race, and some of those people you race with can (no, make that WILL) be idiots. Although I can’t blame Turn 10 for their behaviour.

Anyway, after several extremely annoying games which started with promise, but declined into shouting matches and early quitters, I soon put online play to bed.

Ah, well, at least the offline play’s good …

Until I met a very annoying problem (and that didn’t take long). The sticky throttle. I started to notice this almost immediately, but dismissed it out of hand as my imagination. It then started to become more noticeable. As the cars became more powerful, every race would be met with you coming to a corner and not being able to brake due to the throttle being stuck on, leaving the car pretty much unresponsive.
I was more than a little shocked that something this glaring could be left in the game, and not rapidly sorted out at Beta, but hey, it could be me…

“Right”, thought I, “I’ll check the Forza forums, they’re bound to have some sort of fix.”

Wrong again. Bearing in mind this was a day or so after the release of the game, there were a few small mentions of people having similar throttle issues, but I was shocked at the huge list of silly bugs people had encountered. Could they really have released such a badly unfinished game? Well, on further inspection (and a lot of board trawling), yes they could … and did. Barely a single response from Turn 10 to indicate what they were doing about certain problems, let alone any acknowledgement.

Ever the hopeful one, I submitted a post asking for other people who experienced similar problems to me to say how their problem came about, so I could try and work out what was happening. I could then pass details onto Turn 10 directly, and wait for their response (not wishing to wait and see if they ever really read their forums).

Thanks to some great feedback from the community, the problem is experienced by many (if not all people). It tends to happen when loading either graphical data, or music data (i.e. when the song changes). Unfortunately, nothing was learned as far as how to get rid of the damned problem.

Anyway, I duly emailed Turn 10, and begged them for a reply, even an acknowledgement, and I’ve still heard absolutely nothing. I find this disgraceful.

If you’ll excuse me blowing my own trumpet for a moment, I’ll explain a couple of things.

Firstly, I’ve played games for years; since the heady days of the Nascom-1 kit computer (late ’70s) in fact. I’ve got a collection of games which is way too big for my house, and due to being retired on medical grounds, I’ve got far too much time spare with which to play (snigger).

I’ve always been the sort who will play a game through and through, discovering it’s most hidden secrets – assuming that game’s worth playing that much. I will confess to owning quite a few howlers. If and when I find a bug, I’ve always reported it. In pre-internet days, this would involved ringing up the developer directly. I’ve always received a professional and often prompt response in almost every case (unsurprisingly the couple that didn’t soon ended up biting the dust). In fact, I even got my first job freelancing as a tips writer for the UK Official Playstation Magazine, albeit in a roundabout fashion. I’ve also had some nice freebies and promotional items sent as a “thank you”.

But, I digress a little.

Turn 10′s behaviour is shocking. I trawled the forum boards again, and still was amazed to see a stunning lack of any response from them, and the problems and bugs are obviously growing…

But, the killer for me came just last night. I reached a point in Career mode where I’m racing some sort of Porsche-only series. I go to start the next 3-lap race at Road Atlanta, and the console hangs (I know that not really unusual for the 360). Try again … and again.

After cleaning the DVD player’s lens, clearing the cache files and other things, still no joy. I half-heartedly went back to the forums, and lo and behold, there’s other with the same problem on 3-lap races. No other data, no fix, just the same old bad news.

So, there you have it. My Forza frustration(s). One final note being that as the latest problem is a true “game breaker”, I would like to make one final point to anyone reading this with the same problem: you CAN return your game if this applies, as it is against the Sale of Goods Act, where it states “goods must be of satisfactory quality” (i.e. they must be fit for the purpose for which they were bought).

For me, who never gets rid of a game … well, this might end up being a first.

Well done, Turn 10, well done indeed.